Investigating the recovery of product line architectures: An approach proposal

Abstract

Due to the complexity of managing architectural variability, maintaining the Product Line Architecture (PLA) up-to-date and synchronized with the project source code is a key challenge. Moreover, allow the variability traceability in architectural level of large-scale projects is a costly task. The systematic use of Software Architecture Recovery (SAR) techniques enables PLA recovery and keeps the PLA aligned with development. In this context, we present an initial proposal that consists of an approach to recover PLAs based on SAR techniques. We performed literature reviews and exploratory studies to investigate the relationship between SAR and PLA to identify gaps and define state-of-the-art. Learn how to combine SAR and PLA is an important strategy to address some issues of PLA design. We identified that few studies address architectural variability and provide empirical evaluation For this reason, more empirical research is still necessary.